When we take the top off the SN95G5, we can see a traditional Shuttle SFF layout with a few minor adjustments that have been made to accommodate the new Athlon 64 CPU’s from AMD and the high end NV40 graphics cards from NVIDIA.

As you can see from the right side view of the SN95G5, there is one PCI slot and one 8X AGP slot on the system. As is common with all of Shuttle’s G series systems, the AGP slot is mounted on the outside of the motherboard, not allowing you to use any video cards that take up two slots. The system as a whole is very accessible once the drive chassis is taken off, with heatsink installation being a breeze and features like CMOS jumpers on the outside ends of the motherboard making them easy to reset.

On the left side of the SN95G5 we can see the two DDR memory slots on the motherboard as well as the 240W power supply that is in the system. The left side of the picture shows the neatly wrapped power cables that are funneled throughout the system, and the IDE floppy port is obscurely located on the bottom right corner of the picture. It’s important to note that the way the front panel connects to the motherboard is through a silver ribbon cable, the only thing that I personally did not like about the design of the SN95G5. The silver ribbon cable is very flimsy and once removed, is difficult to reinstall.

Here we can see the latest rendition of Shuttle’s ICE (Integrated Cooling Engine) cooling solution for the SN95G5. From the picture you can see that the base of the ICE cooling system is made of copper with heatpipes connecting to the aluminum exhaust portion of the cooling unit. Installation of the ICE cooling unit was very easy, with it being just like any other Shuttle SFF system. You attack the heatsink, fasten it tight with the included fastener, and just install the 92mm exhaust fan.

Talking about the exhaust fan, above we can see the 92mm fan that is used to keep the SN95G5 cool. Using the Smart Fan feature from the motherboard’s BIOS, the SN95G5 is able to adjust fan speeds according to CPU and system temperatures.

And now we can see a side-view of the SN95G5’s motherboard. The back I/O panel includes a serial port, optical in, powered FireWire 400, PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, digital output, line out, and six speaker audio ports. As is the case with most high end Shuttle XPC systems, the SN95G5 comes equipped with just about every kind of port and feature one could think of.

Also important to note are the two IDE connectors and two SATA RAID connectors on the board, giving you a lot of flexibility when it comes to your hard drive and optical drive usage.